Milton Wolf Seminar 2019

This year’s
Milton Wolf Seminar entitled “The New Global Media (dis)Order in International
Relations: Agonizing Struggles and Elusive Solutions” took place on April
23-25, 2019 at the Diplomatic Academy Vienna.

As we move
further into the 21st Century, a seemingly endless array of
challenges, e.g. fake news, information warfare, environmental degradation,
migration crises, cyber warfare, terrorism, and rising global populism, have
upended once safe democracies, destabilized traditional diplomacy, and called
into question the future of the international system. The relationship between
media and international relations are at the center of many of these crises.
Platform empires like Facebook and Google increasingly appear to operate as
sovereign states while many traditional “old media” platforms have been starved
financially and are unable to cut effectively through the noise of a distorted
and dystopian media environment.

While there have
been countless conferences that focus on documenting media’s role in the
breakdown of the international order, this seminar is traditionally dedicated
to solutions. The 2019 Milton Wolf Seminar explored a wide range of proposals
for how to ameliorate pressing challenges to international relations,
particularly those wrought by a weak and degraded media and communications
environment and probe the strengths and weaknesses of conceivable avenues
forward. It brought together actors from diverse arenas who conceptualized
solutions to today’s acute issues related to media and international relations.

Panellists
included Amelia Arsenault, Senior Advisor in the Public Diplomacy Research and
Evaluation Unit at the US Department of State; Peter Guschelbauer, spokesperson
of the Austrian Foreign Ministry and Head of the Department for Press & Information;
Andrey Rikhter, Senior Adviser at the OSCE Office of the Representative on
Freedom of the Media; Jim Rutenberg from the New York Times; and many more.

The event was
jointly organized by the American Austrian Foundation (AAF), The Annenberg
School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Diplomatic
Academy of Vienna (DA) with support from The Wolf Family Foundation, The
Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation, and the U.S. Embassy, Vienna.